by Mike Ashley
He killed the word and flogged its corpse, only stopping when he couldn’t go on, collapsing back on the couch, exhausted. The word was gone, eradicated, nowhere to be found. Pratt waited, but it didn’t come back. He probed for it fearfully, turning over mossy stones in his consciousness, but no mommy crawled out. He looked at the pages of scribbled mommymommy but it seemed another language to him, unreadable, meaningless, baffling. The word was gone. One down, he thought.
The next word took less time, and the one after that even less. Pratt was suspicious; he checked each word for its absence, but each seemed obediently banished. He finished with dad, then cat, then man and bad and boy, then hat and hot together, repeating them alternately: hathothathothathothathot. He finished a dozen words before he felt his eyelids slipping down towards the floor, his grip loosening on his pencil. He put himself to bed.
The next morning he deliberately avoided the living room, where the coffee table sat littered with sheets of the yellow pad. The words – whichever words they had been – were gone, and he didn’t want them back. As he sipped his coffee in the kitchen he grew increasingly pleased with the events of the previous night, and increasingly resolute. Waking with a smaller vocabulary was exhilarating; he felt lighter, freer, less hemmed in. The clear priority was to send the rest of the language packing, the sooner the better.
After cleaning up in the kitchen, Pratt went out for a walk in the park. The crisp air felt good in his lungs, and the sun felt good on his head. There was nobody in the park yet. Pratt warmed up by disposing of tree and sky, defying categorical reality by staring up at the oak leaves drifting in the wind against a backdrop of blue even as he eradicated the words. This done, he felt immediately ready for bigger things. He rid himself of a couple of unusual, once-in-a-while words: sundial and migraine, mixing them into midial and sungraine before allowing them to fade completely.
It got easier and easier. Even the most tenacious words proved banishable after fifteen or twenty repetitions, and some others slipped away after Pratt pronounced them twice. He’d developed a muscle for destroying language, and it grew strong through exercise. Pratt spent the day wandering through the park, forgetting words: he forgot words as he clambered over boulders and he forgot words while he lay with his eyes closed on the great lawn. When he got hungry he found a vendor and bought a hot dog, and in the process of eating it killed hot dog, killed frank, killed wiener and sausage and wurst, until all the words disappeared and he was left to finish a nameless tube of meat.
Things seemed to like being unnamed; they expanded, became at once more ambiguous and more real. The speech Pratt heard as people strolled past seemed littered with meaningless, musical phrases; their sentences were coming unhinged, and the less Pratt understood the more he liked. As meaningful words assailed his ears he spoke them and rendered them meaningless, then tossed away their empty husks to the invisible wind.
Pratt arrived home exhausted, yet buoyant. He no longer feared the yellow pad on the coffee table; he rushed in and happily made neither head nor tails of it. He opened a book from his shelf and read a sentence, delightedly baffled by most of it; when he found a word he knew he pronounced it and it disappeared. He had it down to a single utterance now. To use a word was to lose it.
Glock called. It jolted Pratt to be on the telephone. He hurriedly conducted a search for the words that were left, to try and patch together a response.
“You should see a doctor,” said Glock. “It’s paid for, it’s taken out of your paycheck, so why not just go? Do you know a good doctor? Why don’t you see mine?”
Pratt didn’t understand. “Overabundant,” he said. “Inconspicuous.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Dr Healthbronner, 548-7980,” Glock went on. “He’s good, I’ve known him for twenty years. I mean, Jeezus, take care of yourself. You sound like shit.”
“Shit,” repeated Pratt into the receiver. Without knowing it, Glock had opened up a whole new category of words. “Piss crap cunt prick snatch,” said Pratt. The words disappeared as he mouthed them.
“Okay, okay, Jeezus,” said Glock. “I was only trying to help. Stay home, for god’s sake, stay home until you feel better. One hundred percent. Call me if you need anything.” He hung up.
The call unnerved Pratt. His job, he saw, was lost to him forever. Quite a lot, in fact, was lost to him forever. He began to wish the process had not gotten so automatic. The few words left began to seem more and more like commodities, things to be treasured. Not that he didn’t want to finish the job, eliminate the language entirely, but now it seemed important to savour its going, to draw the process out.
He slept fitfully that night, and although he had never been a somnolinguist he awoke several times, bathed in sweat and trembling slightly, to the sound of his own voice calling out some stray word into the darkness, always too late to know what he was losing. He felt he’d only slept an hour or two when the sun began to creep through the window.
Pratt showered, shaved, and flossed his teeth, trying to pull himself together. Words surfaced from the murk of his consciousness and he struggled not to say them aloud. He pushed them into a corner of his mind, a little file of what he had left, and like the tiles on a Scrabble tray he shuffled and reshuffled them, trying to form coherent sentences. It was a losing struggle. He could feel words receding, becoming abstract and meaningless just from his thinking about them over-strenuously; he reached the point where for a word to remain meaningful he needed to hear it spoken aloud, given the tangibility of speech, and he lost several words this way, because by now anything he spoke aloud destroyed itself, immediately and forever.
After a thin breakfast Pratt went downstairs, but after walking halfway to the park he was caught in a sudden rain shower, and forced back to his apartment. He was unlocking his apartment door when the phone began ringing, and fumbled impatiently at the lock while it rang, twice, three times, four times; he dropped his keys in the foyer and jogged through the dark apartment to the phone. It seemed suddenly terribly important to answer it.
It was a wrong number. “Dan Shard?” asked the voice on the other end.
Pratt had already surrendered no to the void. He made a guttural sound into the line.
“Dan Shard? Who’s there? May I speak to Mr Shard?”
Pratt shook his head, made the sound again.
“Mr Shard?”
“Pratt,” said Pratt, before he could stop himself. “Pratt,” he said again, wonderingly, and then the word vanished.
“I’m sorry,” said the voice on the line, and hung up.
Pratt saw now that he was painting himself into a corner, in a room where the paint would never dry, where he would have to climb onto the wall, and begin painting that, and then from there onto the ceiling. The horizon of consciousness grew nearer and nearer. The world at large might be round but Pratt’s world was flat, and he was about to fall off the edge of it.
That night he watched the news on the television. The only words Pratt understood on the programme were the neologisms: Crisisgate, Lovemaker Missile, CLOTH Talks, Oopscam and Errscam. Advertisements seemed bewildering and surreal. Switching the channels Pratt eventually stumbled on a station consisting exclusively of these miniature epics, one ad after another. He watched this station, transfixed, for almost half an hour, when it came to him that they were rock videos.
He called Glock back, but got the answering machine. Pratt had saved up a last message, a cry for help, and felt deflated at not being able to deliver it. It was already losing its meaning in the storeroom of his consciousness, and he decided to leave it on Glock’s tape.
“Well, I’m not home,” went Glock’s voice. “Relax. I’ll be back. Just leave a message. Just leave a message, and I’ll call, and we’ll talk. Relax.” The machine beeped.
“Ebbing,” blurted Pratt. He felt proud at having saved such a simple word for so long. The rest of the message wasn’t so easy. “John-Hancocked auto-mortality affidavit,” he co
ntinued. “Disconsolate.” He paused for effect, and then delivered the last word, the only word he had left, the payload. “Bereft,” he said, giving it all he had, the full thespian treatment. The machine clicked off between the two syllables of the word.
Pratt put the phone down. He couldn’t think of any more words. He went to the bathroom and brushed out his tired mouth with mint toothpaste, then went into the living room and gathered up the books on his shelves and carried them out to the incinerator.
Pratt slept surprisingly well that night, cool between the sheets, his mind empty. He didn’t dream. When he awoke he felt cleansed; with the furniture of language finally cleared the movers’ footprints could be wiped away, and the dust-bunnies swept out of the corners. There was nothing left to forget: English had become a foreign language to him, and the world was rendered innocent of connotation. His doubts about the process evaporated. He’d panicked momentarily, been a little weak in the knees, but now that he was language-free he knew how little cause he’d had for alarm. He awoke into a rightness, his wish granted. Like a snail with its shell Pratt now lugged his own private Montreal around on his back. He was a tourist everywhere, a tourist originating from a land so private and complete that it didn’t require a language.
He went downstairs, and out. The sun was busy clearing the puddles away, and Manhattan warmed into activity. Pratt walked up Broadway, feeling confident. Everything seemed bigger now, more promising and mysterious, and, most importantly, further away. He considered going in to work; they couldn’t harm him now that he’d become invulnerable. The air was filled with the musical chatter of conversation – the forest couldn’t harm him now that he’d become invulnerable. The air was filled with the musical chatter of conversation as the forest air is filled with the singing of birds; New York transmuted itself into a wonderland of incomprehensibility.
Pratt passed a shopkeeper haggling with a fat black woman over the price of bananas; she waved her curled-up money and cradled the bananas like a long lost child. Pratt frowned disapprovingly at how much she communicated, beyond language, and at how much he picked it up despite himself. Pratt saw a teenage boy on a skateboard perform a flourish for a gaggle of girls who idled in a building entrance; transfixed by the subtleties of the interaction, Pratt had to tear himself away from it. Suddenly the walls of comprehension were closing in again.
A pair of businessmen with briefcases parted on the sidewalk to make room for Pratt to pass, and though their language seemed a babble of water-rushing-over-rocks, Pratt felt astonished at what he learned from their manner, their expressions and gesticulations. It was inescapable. Like a blind man whose other senses attune themselves in compensation, Pratt found himself involuntarily sensitized to non-verbal forms of communication.
He panicked, turned around and headed back towards his apartment, reverting to his former strategies of steering wide berths around groups of people who might be tainted with language. As he ran Pratt struggled to understand this new predicament, racking his brains like a snake-bit man who had once learned the formula for the antidote.
There was clearly more to communication than language; that had been an underestimation of his opponent, a mistake Pratt knew he couldn’t afford to make twice. It seemed clear enough; he was going to have to forget body language.
Back safe in his apartment, Pratt sat on the couch and began shrugging mechanically.
THE ALL-AT-ONCE MAN
R A Lafferty
RA Lafferty (1914–2002) was unique amongst the annals of science fiction. It’s almost impossible to categorise his work because although much of it uses the standard images and icons of science fiction, they are just pieces on a board game for which Lafferty seems to make up the rules as he goes along. His stories are anarchic and at times incomprehensible, and yet they can be compelling.
Their delight comes from Laffertys acute observation of the illogicality of the lives we lead and his marvellous use of language. There are phrases dotted through his stories that make you stop in your tracks in amazement. Lafferty seldom starts from an obvious point and never takes an obvious route, and yet somehow you reach a natural conclusion in his stories.
The following, about a man’s quest for immortality, is one of his more easily accessible stories, though it’s no less extreme in its conclusion. There have been several collections of Lafferty’s stories, many from specialist presses, and most are worth tracking down, including Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970), Strange Doings (1972) and Through Elegant Eyes (1983), but there is so much more.
A fan website devoted to Lafferty and his work is www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/
I
…let him know that the word translated “everlasting” by our writers is what the Greeks term aionion, which is derived from aion, the Greek for Saeculum, an age. But the Latins have not ventured to translate this by secular, lest they should change the meaning into something widely different. For many things are called secular which so happen in this world as to pass away even in a short time; but what is termed aionion either has no end, or lasts to the very end of this world.
The City of God – Saint Augustine
This is an attempt to assemble such facts (hard and soft) as may yet be found about a remarkable man who seemed to be absolutely balanced and integrated, yet who developed a schizo-gash deep as a canyon right down the middle of his person. Dr George Drakos says he developed three or four such schizo-gashes.
This is also an attempt to record some of the strange goings-on in the house on Harrow Street – and it is a half-hearted (no, a faint-hearted or downhearted) attempt to record the looser goings-on in the subsequently forever house on Harrow Street. The subject is a man who had everything, took hold of something beyond and was broken to pieces by it. Or was not.
“I want to be the complete man,” John Penandrew used to say to himself. “I want to be the complete man,” he would say to all of us who would hear him. Well, he was already the most complete man that any of us had ever seen. He had been a promising young man: as Don Marquis has said of himself, and had been a promising young man for twenty years. But Penandrew didn’t show those twenty years at all, except in his depth.
His eyes, his shape, his everything was just as all had been when he left Monica Hall twenty years before: he had been a gilded youth then – or at least he had been plated over with a very shiny substance. He still was, he was still that youth, but in his depth he was a full man, sure and mature, and with the several appearances together and unconflicting. For he was also the boy he had been thirty years before, in no detail changed. He had been a loud-mouthed kid, but smart all the time and smooth when he wanted to be. Now there was a boy, a youth and a man, three non-contradictory stages of him looking out of his grey eyes. His complexity impressed me strongly. And it also impressed four men who were not as easily impressed as I was.
There were five men who knew everything; and there was myself. We met loosely two or three times a year. The five men who knew everything were this John Penandrew (he was in banks as his father had been); Dr George Drakos, who was Greek and who used to go to Greek school in the evenings; Harry O’Donovan, who was a politician as his fathers had been forever; Cris Benedetti, an ex-seminarian who taught literature and esoterica at the university; and Barnaby Sheen, who was owner of the Oklahoma Seismograph Enterprizes.
These five men were all rich, and they all knew everything. I wasn’t and I didn’t. I belonged to the loose group by accident: they had never noticed that I alone had not become rich or that there were evident gaps in my information.
We had all gone to school twenty years before to the Augustinians at Monica Hall and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and to hold on forever. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans. This information is all pertinent. Without the Augustinian formation John Penandrew would never have shattered – he’d have bent.
“I’ve decided not to die in the natural course of things,” John Penandrew said softly. The other four of those men who knew everything didn’t seem at all surprised.
“You’ve given enough thought to it, have you?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “That’s really the way you want it?”
“Yes, that’s the way I want it,” John Penandrew said. “And I’ve considered it pretty thoroughly.”
“You’ve decided to live forever then, have you?” Barney Sheen asked with just a hint of boyish malice.
“Naturally not to live forever here,” Penandrew attempted to explain. “I’ve decided to live only as long as the world lasts, unless I am called from my plan by peremptory order. I am resolved, however, to live for very many normal lifetimes. The idea appeals to me strongly.”
“Have you decided just how you will bring this about?” Dr George Drakos asked.
“Not fully decided. I’ve begun to consider that part only recently. Of first importance is always the decision to do a thing. The means of carrying it out will have to follow that decision and flow from it. There is no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to do it, though.”
“No, I suppose not,” Cris Benedetti said thoughtfully. “You’re an intelligent man and you’re used to tall problems. But there have been other intelligent men and, as far as I know, none of them has done this thing.”
“Do you know of any really intelligent man who has decided to do this and then has failed in the doing?” Penandrew asked.
“No, not if you put it that way,” Cris admitted. “Most problems remain unsolved simply because they have never been tried seriously and in the proper framework. And there are legends of men (I presume them to have been intelligent) who have done this thing and are doing it. Not very reputable legends, though.”